Ixia IxNetwork 7 Aims to Improve Network Troubleshooting

As network scale, so too do the challenges of network troubleshooting.

Monitoring and troubleshooting networks is a task that is becoming increasingly difficult, as speed, bandwidth and new protocols continue to emerge. In an effort to stay ahead of the curve, Ixia has released its IxNetwork 7 solution offering increased scalability.

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"Usually when you give a person to scale more, you lose the ability to drill down," Asim Rasheed, Technical Marketing Engineer at Ixia, explained to Enterprise Networking Planet.

For example, if an enterprise network has 100,000 sessions, if one of those sessions is down, the network administrator has to dig through all that data to find the one particular session that has trouble.

"In the real world, you need to be able to figure out where the problems are very quickly," Rasheed said. "So when large networks deploy they need to emulate real world scenarios."

IxNetwork's scenario testing lets an administrator see an entire network footprint, which can be helpful for network configuration. There is also a new component know as the Next Generation Protocol Framework that provides the ability to drill down into per session level information.

Spanning Tree or TRILL?

One of the key trends in networking to emerge in recent years is a series of new flatter network deployment approaches to replace Spanning Tree. One of them is TRILL (Transparent Interconnection for Lots of Links), which multiple vendors, including Cisco, are embracing.

The IxNetwork 7 solution can enable a network administrator to compare how a network will work and perform with different protocols.

Rasheed explained that a network administrator can try out TRILL and then compare the performance to traditional networking approaches.

"You can run your tests and get your data to give you solid data to make a case that TRILL is better, rather than just saying that it's something you read about on the internet," Rasheed said.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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